machine generated pages

life expectancy of online catalogs

[mayor]

If I have 5000 items to sell in my online catalog and use a program to pull from a product database and generate an HTML catalog page for each one how long might I expect the site to survive before getting busted as a doorway domain?

[andreasfriedrich]

Glossary: A domain designed to redirect traffic to a main website located on another domain.

Why would a product catalogue be considered a doorway domain? Amazon has a separate page for each product they sell even if those may be created dynamically.

[Mikkel Svendsen]

As long as what you serve up is valid content and HTML there is no problem. You just have to make sure your pages are indexable (and optimized, off course). Some dynamic websites can course some search engines difficulties.

[mayor]

I was thinking of generating static HTML pages. About five thousand of them.

>>Why would a product catalogue be considered a doorway domain?

I thought the SE spam filters were out to boot anything that looked like doorway pages, and I don't see how a product information page is any different from a doorway page.

I would put all the catalog pages on a satellite domain so if it got in trouble it wouldn't be hurting the main site.

[andreasfriedrich]

I would put all the catalog pages on a separate domain so if it got the in trouble I wouldn't be hurting the main site.

Then it will be a doorway domain, since its entire purpose would be to redirect traffic to a main website located on another domain.

[mayor]

>>Then it will be a doorway domain

Yes, we'll call it what it is. A doorway domain with 5000 machine generated pages. That's 5000 highly optimized product information pages that show searchers exactly what they are looking for. Each page would have a discription of the product, an image of the product, and a link to the point of purchase on the main site.

Any experience with this type of arrangement and it's life expectancy with the search engines?

If I moved the point of purchase to the satellite site would that extend it's life expectancy?

[bobriggs]

I've got something similar, not 5000 pages, but more like 100. On 3 different sites with 3 different companies, pages are generated, however, the user is given the option to add comments or 'unique content'.

One site neglected the 'unique content' idea. It is now PR0. I do not know if that is the real reason or not. The others add to the 'unique content', so to speak, and have not been affected.

I have a fourth site, which I knew the owners would ignore the comments section, and the static pages are 'reverse mod-rewrite'; in other words, the links are to cgi-bin (even though the page is actually a static .html) and ban all robots in robots.txt from cgi-bin, exactly the opposite from making a dynamic page look as if it were static.

Bottom line: make sure there's no duplication and you shouldn't have a problem. Next question: what is duplication of content?